This year the Women’s Final Four Tournament will be held in Minneapolis. It’s impeccable timing, as the current position of women’s rights is quite literally March Madness 2022.
In last week’s Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice nominee Kentanji Brown Jackson, we learned it is now controversial to adhere to the scientific and biological position that women definitively exist. While I disagree with much of Judge Jackson’s judicial philosophy, there is a sense of comradery between female attorneys as most female attorneys would agree that even today, we are not always treated as equals with our male colleagues. However, Judge Jackson is not only a female, she will likely be the first African American female U.S. Supreme Court Justice. It is undoubtedly an incredible accomplishment for both her and for our country. Unfortunately, by her own admission, we cannot celebrate that truth. In the confirmation hearings, when asked, “what is a woman?” she replied, “I don’t know, I’m not a biologist.” So, all we can say definitively is that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would be the first person claiming to be an African American woman to sit on the Supreme Court. There’s simply no way to know for sure!
With the wave of intolerance against women (whoever they might be), it should come as no surprise that just last year the ACLU butchered a statement from one of the most prominent women in American history, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, replacing the use of her words “woman” “she” and “her” with gender-neutral words such as “their” and “persons.”
Minnesota is no exception to through-the-looking-glass notions of womanhood. Last year, a male athlete filed a lawsuit against USA Powerlifting for not allowing him to compete in women's powerlifting competition. The Minnesota State High School League (MSHSL) has also wholeheartedly embraced policies allowing for unfair competition between male and female athletes. The organization changed its bylaws to allow males to play on girls’ sports teams in the face of significant opposition and despite incontrovertible statistics showing that male athletes have significant competitive advantages and may even increase the risk of injuring female competitors.
In an effort to protect girls’ safety and athletic opportunity, last year Minnesota legislators introduced a bill simply clarifying the language in current state statute, which simply mirrors federal Title IX allowing for female-only athletic teams in K-12 competition. In response to this bill, at least one State Senator claimed that the bill was morally reprehensible. Chris Voelz, the University of Minnesota’s women’s athletic director, is also dismissive of women’s concerns. Based on her recent remarks to the Star Tribune, she believes it’s completely acceptable for males to compete in female athletics as long as it doesn’t happen too frequently. For Chris Voelz, apparently, if a handful of female athletes lose championship spots and scholarship opportunities to male athletes, that’s a good thing – it shows that women’s sports are truly “gender diverse.” We have a different view – even one female athlete losing out to a male athlete, or injured competing with a male, is too many.
Moreover, the NCAA has degraded the position of women in its own leagues. Years ago, Title IX of the Civil Rights Act was passed to protect women from oppression and unequal treatment, particularly in sports and educational opportunities. Throughout the Tournament, the NCAA has aired countless commercials about women’s opportunities in sports—yet NCAA rules allowed a male to swim against females in the NCAA swimming championships, dominating women’s categories, setting new records for the sport and earning a Division 1 national title. The word “sex” within Title IX has until now, never been questioned as affording legal protection to female athletes. But now this law that was created to protect women has been misinterpreted and abused by state and federal legislators, judges, and athletic organizations. “Sex” in Title IX must now mean “gender,” and “gender” must mean precisely anything. For a male to identify as a woman, deserving of the protections of Title IX, is now a simple matter of getting a doctor’s note asserting that he is taking feminizing hormones.
The Supreme Court, however, has explicitly stated that it was not deciding matters relating to Title IX and women’s sports or facilities when it decided Bostock v. Clayton County, a case about sex discrimination in the employment context. Activists for male athletes in women’s sports have also conveniently omitted significant facts regarding the status of recent state court opinions about transgender athletes’ participation in sports and access to girls’ facilities. Since 2014, school boards and administrators in Minnesota who have sought to protect female athletes have been browbeaten by a swath of progressive activists and state agencies into thinking they have no choice but to settle lawsuits in favor of athletes who want to compete on opposite-sex sports teams and use female only facilities. In Minnesota, cases like this have only reached the appellate level. The Minnesota Supreme Court has yet to affirm the appellate court’s narrow opinion on this issue.
This is truly March Madness. For many parents, it’s maddening to think that our daughters are being disregarded and disrespected, to the extent that the existence of female athletes as a separate category is being threatened. Any legislation or regulations contrary that seeks to undermine the protections afforded to women under current law make a mockery of the achievements and gains women athletes have made over the last few decades. Advocating for female athletes against aggressive attempts to push them out of their own sports is always going to be the right thing to do. Our daughters deserve better than what they’re getting from school districts, athletic associations, and the state government.
For the NCAA, I have a question: which of the incredibly talented athletes in the women’s Final Four tournament deserves to be displaced by a male competitor? Perhaps Minnesota’s own Paige Bueckers, playing for the University of Connecticut? After all, wouldn’t that show how far our state would go to protect male athletes who feel like female athletes? Indeed, if our coaches could recruit more female-identified male athletes, we could really turn the future of Gopher athletics around!
This modest proposal will no doubt be offensive to some. To them I say, in that case, please make this scenario impossible by reaffirming and strengthening the protections female athletes already should enjoy under federal law. That’s the best way to give women and girls the opportunity to excel.
